A few years ago, Australian artist Shaun Tan made a big splash with his book The Arrival. It is the story of an immigrant’s journey, told entirely in pictures, about the traveler’s decision to leave his country and follows him to a strange, new world. It is a moving and deeply engaging piece of work.
This year, a second book was released in the United States called Tales from Outer Suburbia. This time, Shaun Tan includes stories to go with his dreamlike illustrations. Tales from Outer Suburbia consists of 15 stories in which the unusual impinges on an otherwise ordinary setting. The stories deal with subjects like the places where maps end or the inner lives of mysterious neighbors. One of my favorite tales is called “Grandpa's Story,” in which the narrator's grandfather tells him about his marriage to his grandmother:
"Weddings used to be more complicated in those days.... For a start, the bride and groom were sent away before the ceremony.... we were given a sealed envelope, a compass, and the traditional wedding boots—hardy things they were, with steel caps. Each guest told us a special riddle, like a cryptic crossword clue. We had to listen hard and remember them all, strange instructions that would supposedly make sense later on...."
The point, it seems, of all this preparation is a kind of crazy scavenger hunt where the couple must pick up certain items on the list, guided only by vague clues, before they are allowed to get married. What follows are nine pages of threatening landscapes: steep hills, looming monsters, unwelcoming cities, flooded plains. The couple gets in a horrendous fight following a flat tire in the middle of the desert. It takes both of them to unbolt the spare tire in the trunk. Beneath it they find their wedding rings. They make up, decide the only way they will make it back to civilization is to do it together, and find their way back to their home where there is just enough time to prepare for the ceremony.
The skeptical listeners approach their grandmother to see if she will verify their grandfather’s story. "‘Well, you know I rarely agree with your grandpa's account of anything,’ she tells us. ‘But in this case I'll make a rare exception.’ And she shows us the other ring they found under the spare tire, out in the desert.”
It's a very poetic description not just of weddings, but of marriage itself. And that is how most of these stories work: whether it's about clues to the inner lives of mysterious neighbors, the gifts left behind in the pantry by a pint-sized exchange student, or the wise water buffalo hiding in the grass at the end of the block, what is most compelling about Shaun Tan’s work is the sense of having dreamed—and forgotten—many of these things before.
However, many readers are left with the question of the book’s intended audience. Some of the scenes in The Arrival are a little scary, especially those images describing the reasons people left their previous homes for a new one. Likewise, a few of the stories in Tales from Outer Suburbia have a strangeness to them, the way foreign elements intrude on a familiar landscape. Tan addresses the question of readership on his website in an essay about illustrating picture books:
“The simplicity of a picture book in terms of narrative structure, visual appeal, and often fable-like brevity might seem to suggest that it is indeed ideally suited to a juvenile readership. It’s about showing and telling, a window for learning to ‘read’ in a broad sense, exploring relationships between words, pictures and the world we experience every day. But is this an activity that ends with childhood, when at some point we are sufficiently qualified to graduate from one medium to another? …it’s clear that older readers, including you and me, remain interested in the imaginative play of drawings and paintings, telling stories, and learning how to look at things in new ways.”
And that’s what really captured my attention about these books, along with the imagination of countless readers. The incorporation of strange elements on an ordinary suburban landscape acknowledges that suburbs are real places, too. Not a place where nothing happens, but a place where everything happens for those who have eyes to see it.
Sarah Wood, a reviewer for Teenreads.com and Kidsreads.com since 2003, is a lifetime reader and writer. She refuses to accept that there are people who don't like to read and stubbornly believes this is only because they have not met the right book yet.
